


they don't know what you have done

by pinuspinea



Series: Swan Lake remixes [13]
Category: Swan Lake & Related Fandoms, Лебединое озеро - Чайковский | Swan Lake - Tchaikovsky
Genre: Dark Magic, F/M, Fairy Tale Retellings, Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-13
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:27:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27543835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinuspinea/pseuds/pinuspinea
Summary: He forms them out of his own magic, but they are not truly his creations. They are something more, something stranger, something he cannot control.Snapshots of the swan maidens.
Relationships: Odette & Swan Maidens, Odette/Von Rothbart (Lebedínoye Ózero | Swan Lake), Odile & Swan Maidens, Von Rothbart & Swan Maidens
Series: Swan Lake remixes [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1824241
Kudos: 10





	they don't know what you have done

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Swan Lake comment club](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Swan+Lake+comment+club).



> Three fics in a week? Must be November. You're welcome, darlings.

Their forms are pulled from the ether of time and space by his magic. Even before they come to be, they are there, waiting for his summons, already knowing what their fate will be. They are sisters, reflections of a woman he is constantly thinking about, her most loyal subjects and trusted friends.

He creates them during a moonlit night and looks at their white feathers. They flock together in front of his proud eyes and bend their necks in greeting of their king, and he takes them to meet their queen.

She is still a small girl, but already the years have changed her. They study her curiously as he changes them to better reflect this form of hers, and their hands hound her skirts and their eyes look at her and they touch and belong to her.

He smiles, proud of what he has managed to bring up from the depths of eternity, and her lips press against his cheek.

They watch it and wonder when her kisses will stop being so chaste, why they are not as they thought the kisses of their queen would be to their king.

* * *

Their life in this world is strange. Nights are marked by the bright stars they used to be a part of and the moon that brings power to them. Days are told in the wind whispering in the reeds their queen calls her home, and they form a flock around her. Their court is of white feathers and torn skirts, reflections of her image on the lake's surface, of quiet stories they hear from her memories and that they try to repeat back at her.

She finds their arms easily and lets their bodies warm hers. She finds their touch when her days are too bright and her nights too dark, and they try to ease the pain in her chest, the same hole they feel in their own.

But their queen remains full of sorrow. No matter how they try to amuse her or comfort her, she always flees their presence eventually and searches for their king. He accepts her with open arms and caresses her as softly as their most gentle caresses, but their caresses do not make her shiver in the way his caresses do.

They look at the way their king adores her, how he admires her, how he tries to woo her. She is still so young in her eyes and he is already so old, having waited for her arrival for as long a time as they waited for him to summon them. He looks at her like she is fragile, but she is not that. She is their queen. She is stronger than anyone they have ever known, and the world beyond these forms is so vast and full of everything.

One night, when the leaves are orange instead of green, their king and queen meet on the shore of the lake, the neutral ground between their two kingdoms. He takes off her crown and she takes of his armour. They touch like humans touch one another, and they ache and sigh and embrace and meet one another.

The swan maidens see it all through the eyes of everyone, through the mind of them all. Their thoughts are all shared, every idea formed in all of them and given to all of them. They see from one set of eyes the way he kisses her like he loves her, and how she answers that kiss like she wants to believe it.

They already know what he cannot say, but those words are not theirs to say. They simply are there to guard the lake and their queen, they simply are there to ease their king's worries.

He watches the dawn with her and asks for her again in his own, strange way that does not make sense to the swan maidens, but so little makes sense to beings like them.

Their queen joins them again, and they allow her to find a place to hide from her thoughts and emotions amongst them all and in the safety of a dress of feathers.

* * *

She is a strange queen. They watch her throughout the time that humans call centuries, and they study the way she changes. Her hands are strong yet soft. Her face is scared but she is brave. She aches but she loves. She is all these contradictions in one, a thousand shards formed into one coherent picture, a collection of their features.

They are limited in their existence like this, limited by the laws of his summons, limited by their numbers and the things they can understand. He has made them all slightly different, allowing their understanding to grow with their numbers, but not even that is enough. They could never be enough for their queen.

They will never be enough as long as he is there, their king, her consort.

* * *

This world is strange. Their wings in this place are different than in the other, but the joy of flying is all the same. Flying here is so full of falling, of continued effort stopping their dives towards an unyielding ground before it can smash their fragile forms that only contain the multitudes of their existence.

Flying here is a danger they did not understand, and helplessly, they watch as their queen plummets towards the ground. Their distress is enough to warn their king. He manages to save his queen, but only barely.

They dive deep into the cool waters and bring her to him and look at him and beg for him to help her, to save her, and they watch as his hands shake and as he pushes his magic, as the waterdrops falling from her feathers turn into beads on her skin.

They wait until he has given his orders, and then they watch as he takes their queen inside the fortress of his house.

Their legs and hands shake with anger, and their beaks and wings flutter with rage. The mortals on the other shore have nowhere to hide in the realm that is ruled by their king and queen, in the world that has been occupied by them all for all these years. They hunt the hunters and their hands grasp at them and their mouths and beaks fill with blood as their fingers and claws tear and pull apart and punish those who must be punished for their rude gestures and forbidden deeds.

The bodies fall to the ground and remain still. They look at one another, dressed in red and guts, and they decide who will take the blame so their queen will never have to know for certain which of them were there to kill these men who entered the realm of magic and fate.

* * *

There is only waiting for their queen. Nothing in his house tells them what is going on, but deep inside, they still know they have a queen, a queen who is hurt but healing, a queen who will one day return to them.

They do not see their king, either. He is in the fortress of his house, hidden away from the world with his queen, finally having her in his arms and wishing it could last forever. They feel his wishes just like they always do. His words and hopes are the rules that govern his magic, after all, and they are all made of his magic.

His love has made them all love her. His love has made them all want her.

His love is not enough to keep their queen away from them. There is a night when he is desperate, a night when they know she will join them again, and they rejoice and join her on the shores, waiting for her, white feathers and black feathers mixing until no one is certain who tore the king's throat apart and took his crown for their king to declare a war upon.

* * *

Moments of their life are marked into the fabric of reality in more ways than could be ever explained, but there is a time when they all feel the unsure blinking of another existence that is not one of them, another existence that they cannot understand, another existence that is in their midst yet nowhere to be met.

Their queen starts carrying secrets and hiding from their king. Mutely, they watch her attempts and wonder what the secret is she is so desperately to wish out of existence, but then, their king has enough of it. Their hands point him towards their queen, and they watch as she cries, not understanding why her tears are of sorrow instead of joy.

He steals her away from them, at least during the days. The nights he brings her back to the lake, but no matter how much their hands linger or how they look at him, he does not falter in that decision.

Their queen is pale and tired, and her eyes hold something fragile in them, and they try to tell their king of what is wrong with their hands, but he does not see them. He has only eyes for his queen, no eyes at all for her court.

The light in their queen's eyes fades to dimness as she grows rounder and slower and as their newest member's arrival nears. They become restless. They have never had to wait for his summons for this long a time. Usually, they appear when he calls for them, never dallying for longer than what is necessary, but this one is dallying and slower than any of them.

One night, she does not come outside with him. One night, they wait restlessly and their hands and feathers flutter as they look at one another and wonder.

In the morning, she staggers over to them and flees his house and transforms before he manages to catch her. Her body is weak, and her human eyes have tears in them, and she sleeps against them in a nest hidden in the reeds.

They wonder and look at her, and then their eyes glance towards the house where their king is hiding the newest addition to their numbers, and they wonder why they cannot see with her eyes or hear with her ears, but there is no way for them to get an answer.

Their flock remains torn apart by something that none of them have the capability to understand, and he does not summon another member amongst their midst that could explain to them all what they are missing.

* * *

The youngest swan is born black. She does not choose to wear black feathers of her own, does not willingly change herself. They look at her and the brightness in her eyes and listen to the laughter that does not carry with it an echo of the other world, and they wonder who this stranger they should already know is.

Their king and queen give her a name, a name that is like another twisted reflection that they all are, but they do not give any of the other members of the flock a name. They look at one another and wonder whether they'd like to have names. They look at one another and they do not speak, of course they do not speak.

There are words in their souls, words that their queen has spoken to their king or will speak one day. Those words are enough of a name to each of them.

The little cygnet among them all grows up knowing their hands and their adoration, grows up knowing the memories they have seen in their queen's dreams, and their queen takes the little cygnet to where they have never before stepped foot into.

In the hidden depths of the forest, there is a village that has been long forgotten by time. In that village, there are ruins of houses that once upon a time were homes, and by a stream there is a mill with its waterwheel fallen over onto the rocks.

They let the cygnet and their queen haunt the hidden world under the canopy all by themselves.

They are creatures of the lake, forever tied to it.

* * *

The little cygnet turns into the princess as she grows. None of them know for certain where that knowledge came from, but they all agree that one day, the cygnet will be the one to rule them all.

Their princess flies, her black feathers so dark against the pale blue sky, and their queen flies away with her. The swan maidens watch as they leave, but they know that they will always return to the water.

Nothing about that day is any different than any of the other days of their existence, but that night, their queen lands on the shore. They all are surprised by who finds her there, by who takes her in his arms.

They rustle around the couple, and they look at the way their queen looks at that strange boy, and they want him to go away. No one is allowed to have their queen's eyes looking at them other than their king, but this boy has drawn from their queen what their king has always been aching for. And so, they desperately try to make them stop, try to make sense return to her, but she allows herself to fall for the fairy tale of a handsome prince coming to her lake and taking her away from them all.

Dawn arrives, and with it, their king. His infinite anger pushes the fool of a boy away, and their queen trembles in their midst. They cannot guard her from the results of her actions, and they can only watch with sorrow as their king yells and bleeds out his pain.

* * *

He hides her away from them, and when night descends, he leaves the lake with their princess.

* * *

They hide in the forest and hear the desperate calls of a boy who should know better, but he does not. He runs into their domain, into their realm, and slowly, they surround him and stop him from leaving.

Their legs are so light as they walk circles around him, and their princess easily breaks into that small area in between them all. She looks at the boy, and the boy looks at her and is horribly mistaken, and there are tears in the princess's eyes as the boy tries to apologise to her.

Her hands speak of anger and they tell an order that steals the crown from her mother. The swan maidens are made to obey. That is what they do the best. That is the only thing they can do.

They grasp at the boy, but they do not tear into him. For all his mistakes, he does not deserve the same fate as his father once before him.

The lake is cool around them all, and he trashes and fights against them, but together, they become one. They pull him deeper, deeper into the embrace of the lake, and they close their eyes and remain in the bottom with him and let air bubble out of their mouths as his fight ends.

They wrap their arms around one another and fall asleep, one at a time, their existence fading with their bodies.

* * *

A hand pulls them towards the surface. It is not the same hand as the first time they were summoned, but they are still beckoned by the call. It is a call they cannot afford to obey, after all.

The new queen stands on the shore and watches mutely as they come out of the water, now looking much less like the old queen. Finally, they have faces of their own, faces that have not been moulded by the desperation of a man.

They look at their queen, and they bow down at knee to her.

* * *

Their old queen is even more silent than she was before, and in their black dresses and feathers, her eyes seem to float all over them. Her eyes are so empty now, so lost, and they know there is no reason to return to her anymore. They wouldn't be welcomed, not like their presence and comfort is welcomed by their new queen, their quiet companionship being the only thing that she accepts during her difficult days and impossible nights.

Their new queen often wraps her arms around her and looks like she cannot breathe, like there is something pushing the breath away from her lungs. Their new queen doesn't say anything, doesn't ask for help, but they rub circles onto her back and wrap their arms around her and help her forget everything when they fly with her, black birds against an even blacker night sky.

The new queen is so different than she was before, but they are still the same, always the same even if they now look a little bit different. They simply wear different costumes for different people. They simply had to adapt to a different dress with their old queen and not show her the truth about them all.

Their new queen becomes like her father, powerful and heartbroken yet still breathing. Their old queen remains lost in her own eyes and inside a world of her own.

They all remain at the lake. They all belong to the lake.


End file.
